Marketing Pillar #6 - Online Marketing

You're listening to podiatry marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald.

Welcome back to Podiatry Marketing. I'm your host Jim McDannald here with all the way as always with Tyson Franklin. Tyson, how's it going today?

I'm good today, Jim. Looking forward to today's topic. This is going to be the final pillar we're gonna discuss.

Pillar number six. Which one which one are we gonna be talking about today, Tyson?

Oh, pillar six. You just said it.

I know, but like, what's it about though? Like, I don't even know.

Okay. So pillar six is online marketing. When I actually wrote my first book, I called it web based marketing. Not sure why. And then when I wrote the second book, it's no secret as money in small business, I changed it to online marketing, and that's where I've sort of stayed.

So today's topic, pillar six, online marketing.

Yeah. There's a lot of different ways to determine, you know, determine that. I think web was kind of a big thing earlier in the day, and then I kinda switched into online. And now you get a lot of the digital marketing stuff because there you know, some things, whether they're apps or what they are, you know, it's whether it's online, is it on the phone, you know, just kind of a catch all phrase. So you kind of you know, things change over time, don't they?

Yeah. It's and what was funny, what changed a lot with my thinking was when I wrote my first book, It's No Secret, It's Money and Podiatry, I said all pillars were equal. And what I meant by that was you should put an equal amount of time into each pillar over a given time frame. My thinking changed though. Over a three or four year period, all of a sudden, I realized, no, all pillars aren't equal.

Pillar one to five are equal, and you should put time into them. But pillar number six on my marketing is the king. It is the dominant pillar out of all of them. It's something that you should constantly be working on. Whereas the others, I do this thing called pillar rotation.

So so I went in my marketing workshops. I explained how you it might be one month to put focus on say professional affairs. The next month, you might taper that down a lot. Don't give up on it completely, but you put your focus into pillar number two, non professional. And you do that each month you rotate.

But pillar six, your online marketing is something you should always be working on. You don't sort of we'll give that a break for six months and come back to it later. It's something you should always be working on.

Now that makes total sense. Obviously, me being a digital marketer and a provider, you know, marketing service podiatrist, I definitely agree with that. But how did you come to that that conclusion or that? How did you have that epiphany that it's something that needs to be done? You know, it's a little bit above the level of the other pillars.

Well, it was because I was looking at my own habits. So when I had the podiatry clinic, I was every week, I was always writing a blog on something. I was always going back and just looking at my website and tidying things up. If I was doing, say, external marketing, say I was placing an ad in the newspaper, yes, it's fine to have that ad, and then that ad may end up online because newspapers went digital as well. So I'm thinking, even though I'm doing that's external marketing, but at the bottom of the ad, I'd always have something there about our website.

So I realized that all the other pillars kept feeding into the online marketing pillar, which made me realize your online marketing never stops. It's always something that you must be thinking about. So we could have an editorial in newspaper. We would get an electronic version of that. I would then take that electronic version, and I'd put it onto our social media pages.

Once again, I'm back onto the online. So I I noticed through my own marketing habits that I may not always do external marketing, but I was always doing online marketing. So it I just realized it is a constant. It you must always be working at it.

No. That makes total sense. I think you you touched on a topic which is that, you know, your brick and mortar clinic is your physical presence in the real world. Yeah. And your website and your online marketing is that presence and that kind of home base, if you will, for where things get pointed to, where the the links or go information, you know, it's all paths lead back to your your website and your online presence.

So that that makes total sense to me.

Yeah. Well, my friend Nikki Judd, who did my website and the one thing Nikki and I were doing a workshop together once, and she said, your website is your mothership. And everything you do should be keep is to push everyone back to your mothership. So you don't run an ad and say, hey, go to my Facebook page. But in your Facebook page, you may have something there, but you always wanna try and link it back to your website.

And and I think that's something that people forget sometimes. They'll do an ad, go to my Facebook page. No. Why? If you don't do that, get them to your website.

It's your website which is you own everything on your website as well, which is important.

No. That's hugely important. You don't you don't control those other platforms. Right? And they they're always changing the rules.

You know, they they once they're on those platforms, they may send them to different podiatrists, you know, they might who might be advertising on their platform. So when you do send them to your home base or to your website or to your online presence, then you have that. You kinda control the environment, or you work with a, like, a provider who has built a website for your ideal patient, so it's just more attractive to them. So, yeah, that I definitely agree with that that line of thinking.

Yeah. So you might be sending something to a professional referrer. Always have information there on how they can find your website or anything else that you're you're sort of doing online. You might have a focus for the month on internal marketing. What are we gonna do internally in our business to attract more patients?

And we've spoken on that. But every but eventually, you can't just constantly keep putting a % energy in it. And that's what I meant about the the pillar rotation was put a lot of focus into it over a period of time, but you gotta let it taper down. You don't give up on it, but you gotta put your focus onto another pillar, but never lose focus on on your website, writing blog articles, looking at your your social footprint. How often are you posting?

Do you have a strategy for all your your online presence? And that's the thing that a lot of people tend to forget. They will do a Facebook post this week, won't do one for another three weeks, then all of sudden, they might do five in a week. There's no strategy and thinking behind social media, blog writing, updating websites, and I think that's something that needs to be well thought out with with yourself, your team, and whoever else you're working with. You do this with your clients, wouldn't you?

Yeah. I mean, you have to have some like, set up consistent expectations for a cadence of information. If, like you said, if you're, you know, if you're sending out a monthly email and people are expecting it, you're probably more likely to get some feedback and for people to expect it and not market as spam or unsubscribe. It's when you, you know, it's when when you're being erratic with with that that cadence. Like, you go from, you know, one email, like, every six months, then all of a sudden, you know, four in a month, people are gonna be like, what's even going on here?

It's Yeah. It can, like, create it's like a bad user or kind of a bad patient experience. So like you said, a lot of these channels, especially on the digital side, you just have to have a routine. Not that that stuff has to be exactly the same, but you need to, like, get into a good habit. I mean, it's kinda like this podcast.

Right? It comes out, you know, every Monday.

It does.

I schedule it on Sundays. You do a great job of editing it. And, like, it's one of those things where, like, we have a consistent workflow where people are expecting you to know new show on Monday. So it's no different when you're marketing your podiatry clinic.

I I love that word that you're using cadence because it'd be no different to someone doing a marathon and just getting that that rhythm going, and they just keep running. And they go for 42 kilometers. I'd go for about 400 meters, that'd be it for me, but they just get the rhythm. They don't walk for a certain period of time and then sprint, and then stop, have a bit of a rest, sprint again, and then start walking. That's not how you do a marathon.

It's Well well Yeah. It's that it's that regular beat. It's that consistent sort of action that you're doing over a long period of time.

Well, it's like those like, when you see a kid run a cross country race or a track race for the first time. Right? Let's say it's an 800 meter. There's two laps around the track. Yeah.

99% of the time, a % of the time, that kid is gonna run the first lap the fastest. Right? So like, you get out to like, that's how you are in digital some people are in digital marketing or online marketing. Right? Like, it's exciting.

I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna do all those things really quick. And then the kid gets to the second lap, and it's like, is he gonna is he gonna even make it around the around the track on that second lap? His hands, you know, his hands are on his hips. He's huffing and puffing, slowing down.

Like, the same thing happens with enthusiasm around kind of these new these new shiny objects sometimes, and even in digital marketing. Right? So you just have to have that that steady pace, that cadence, and just be like you talked about, from a marathon, try to hit even splits. Yeah. You know, be even Steven and Seti, and that's gonna win the race.

Yeah. Well, I have seen people do that with the website, and you can tell. You go to the website, you'll click on the blog section, they'll have eight blog articles there. All came out within about two two or three weeks of each other four years ago. Was nothing.

There was so much excitement. Oh, I got my website. Write a blog. Next week, write a blog. Next week, write a blog.

Three years later, no blog, and it just it just died. And you can have a look and they have latest news items on their website. It'll be something that happened three years ago around the same time they wrote the blogs. You'll go to their Facebook pages, and it'll be the same thing. There's there's all this action in short periods of time like the kid doing the first four hundred meters, and then all of a sudden, there's there's nothing for three weeks.

Then all of sudden, there's action. And you can normally tell when there's a new team member has turned up who might be a little bit tech savvy or loves the whole online world, and that creates the excitement again, but then once again, it it dies back off. Yep. So have you got tips? Have you got any tips on what you would advise people when it comes to creating the right cadence or creating a strategy for their for their overall online marketing pillar?

Yeah. I think it's a lot of things you talked about there. I think it's about finding those kind of high impact channels or things that they think will benefit kind of the niche or the specialty that are in. And then just starting off it's I think it's better to start off doing less but consistently less

Yeah.

As opposed to, like, just, like, getting kinda like I said, these kinda bright shiny objects. Right? Like, you wanna try to do, like, eight things in the first month when you're trying to do these things. So, like, you know, like, I kinda walk people through, like, the first step of any online presence is, like, that website. Right?

Like, get a professional looking website, get authentic photos, get testimonials from people. Like, that's, like, kind of the baseline. Work on your home, and then you can branch out into other aspects of, you know, whether it be Facebook organic or Facebook ads or Google ads. Those other things can be added on in the future, but just, like, making sure that you have that home base, which is, appeals to your ideal, patient with the type of care you wanna provide, the type of patients you treat, and just, like, iterate on that. And it's not always perfect to start start off with, but just, you know, getting things that show you as the expert, you know, to have that kind of symbols of trust on your website, testimonials from people that you've helped basically overcome certain injuries or perform certain procedures.

You know, I think really kind of like dialing in a unique professional looking website is kind of the first step. And then and then, like, you can talk about blog post writing. But the the the foundation of the content on that website and, you know, highlighting your expertise should be, like, the first thing that needs to be iterated on because you're not gonna get it even a great web website provider, that's gonna take some time and some feedback with that person to get it dialed in to where it should be.

Yeah. And one thing I always warn people, and I've probably said it before, if you make your own website and you do your own website, you design the whole thing, just be careful because even parents with ugly kids think they look good. So if you've done your own website and you go, oh, jeez. I've done a good job. It looks so good.

Even if you just ask close family and friends, they might tell you, oh, yeah. It looks it looks good, but it may not. And I think that's where using a professional person to unless you're an expert at it yourself and you know seriously what looks good, but if you're not like, I would never design my own website. I had it done for me. I do everything behind the scenes now, and I I look after it, and I nurture it, and I do everything I should, but I didn't do the design because I know all my kids look good.

So I'd be biased.

Well, you love your practice. You love Yeah. What you do for work, and it's really hard to be unbiased and really take a, like, step into the shoes of the patient or to some stranger coming onto your website and wanting to perform a certain action. Because you know you know all the care you provide. You know how to get in contact with your clinic.

You know all these things, so you kind of already project that onto the website. But someone who's never been to your website, doesn't know you, doesn't know the care you provide, is looking for certain types of information on your website. Like, they have a different mindset, and it's really, really hard when you're inside your practice to really see that perspective. It takes, you know, not that you have to have some crazy expensive website, but you need to have an outside perspective to like do those steps, those actions that not only are gonna benefit you and your clinic, but also will benefit the community and your prospective patients.

Yeah. It's true. And I think the other part with your website, your website is a really good place to one, people are gonna find. You're gonna you're gonna have patients that will come to your website for starters, but you're gonna have complete strangers that turn up at your website. And I think it's a good idea to have something there that you can offer that they can download for free in exchange for their email address.

So you need to have, yeah, a good CRM program in the background that you're collecting these email addresses, and then once again, you're nurturing those. To me, that is all part of your whole your whole online presence. Doing e newsletters is part of your online presence. Connecting with other businesses on social media and other other people through LinkedIn is part of your online presence. So even though we spent yeah.

We've talked a lot about websites. Just think of any single time you're in front of your computer and you're using the internet somewhere, that is part of your online work. And like I said, it needs to be part of your cadence. You need to get a habit of doing certain things. I know some people that when it comes to well, say Instagram, for example.

They might have an Instagram page and they dedicate yeah. It might be one hour a week where all they do is just dedicate that one hour a week towards Instagram because it's a platform that works well for them. Other people I know jump on TikTok. You can't you can't be on every platform and do it well. So to me, it's important to talk to your patients, find out what platforms they are on, your ideal patient, and then focus your attention into those platforms.

And that's all part of your your online strategy as well.

Yeah. It's also about talking to your patients. I think we talked about in previous podcast about patient surveys and just having conversations with our patients about what they like, where they're at. They don't have to be invasive conversations, right, or be Yeah. Pump people for too much personal information.

But when you get the general sense of where those ideal patients are coming from, like you said, you know, knowing what channels they are, what social platforms, and then being there, being visible on those channels is super important because this is always something that's changing. You know, this is you know, Facebook used to show every like, all your friends, all your posts, and doesn't work that way anymore. No. You know, these these platforms, you know, are are they want to be fed by user engagement. So, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.

Or if it's something controversial, it's gonna get a lot more engagement. They wanna show that to people to keep them on the platforms and looking at advertising.

I put something on my personal page a little while ago and it had and I did a little photo and it had knob head alert or knob head warning, I think it said. It was probably one of the most engagement I've ever got on a post that I've done. And it was about someone who had approached me, yeah, like a friend request. I saw it. I had a look and I said, oh, yeah.

I know some of these people that they know. So I said, okay. I accepted it. Then all of a sudden, this person was like, hey. You should have a look at my yeah.

I can help you 10 times your business and I'm like, no. Here we go. So I went and had a look at his profile, dug in a little bit deeper, and I send him a message. He said, can I offer you a little suggestion? When I go to your personal page, I learn nothing about you.

All this is is 100% business from start to finish. Nothing. Next thing, he tells me to f off. He starts like, he starts arguing with me and and getting really rude and and all this nice. So I gave him the well, he actually unfriended me before I could unfriend him because I just kept staring him.

I kept picking at him to make get him all fired up. But then, yeah, I just put knob head alert that I I'm sick of people connecting with you on social media purely just to ram stuff down your throat. It's really annoying. The reason I bring that up is even with your own Facebook pages that's connected with your clinic, just remember that if your patients are following you, they don't want constant podiatry stuff just rammed down their throat every single day. Mix it up.

Share some podiatry information. Direct them to your website. But at other times, let them see a little bit more about who you are so they know that you're a person. And whether it's something about the community, it could be a a quote, it could be an interesting story, but don't just make it all about you and your podiatry business because it can get boring really, really fast.

No. I totally agree. If you don't have a little bit of personality in there and you're always asking, like, schedule appointments, schedule appointments, schedule appointments Yeah. They'll they'll tune you out, they'll unlike the page, and then move on because no one wants to be, you know, not I wouldn't say it's being hassled, but just you don't want to have that constantly in your face. You wanna have a person, you know, that those channels are to build trust, to build relationships, and it should be approached that way.

And if it's trying to be, you know, just a transaction, most people are just gonna tune that out or just delete or unlike.

Oh, definitely. And I've seen pages that do it really well. You'll see there might have a couple thousand p yeah, people following it. You can tell the the engagement by how many, yeah, how many people are not just liking it. Anyone can just like, it's the comments that people do or it's the how many times it is shared.

So when I put the thing, nob head alert, that was shared three or four times very, very quickly because people read them went, yeah. I I hate that too. And they shared it on their page which made my post even more popular. But you can see the the clicks that don't do it well, they'll post something. It'll have three likes from their mom, their dad, and the business owner.

They the staff don't even like it. So I'm thinking if you're posting stuff at the moment on social media and you're not getting any engagement, just change the angle of it. Just do something a little bit

Yep. It's about iterating, experimenting a little bit with different types of content and yeah. And then you'll find your niche.

Yeah. So with in review of the whole online presence, just remember, the six marketing pillars, one to five are all equal, but number six, your online marketing is something you must keep working on, keep improving, keep trying to get better, test new things. And and a tip that somebody gave me ages ago said, every time a new platform comes on board, say for example, it's TikTok or whatever it is, sign up for it. You don't have to use it, but at least sign up for it and try and get your practice name as soon as possible. Get your practice name and even your personal name.

Even if you never use it because you don't know which platforms are gonna do what. Who would have thought Facebook was I thought Facebook was crap when I first saw it. I was wrong. Nikki Judd, you have a good friend. She said, it'll never last.

She admits it was she was wrong. And even the people who use Facebook, it's changed over the years. The yeah. Now it's not people our age. My daughter who's 78 gets Facebook.

I don't go on Facebook. I'm on Snapcrap or something. So you never know. Just keep keep watching what's happening. Grab your name and your business name if you can, whether you use it or not.

So that's all I had to say, Jim, on this topic. I I want you to conclude because this is more your area than my area.

Well, yeah. But I think you have some good input some good input and thoughts there. I think the biggest thing you said is, like, it's kind of it translates to, like, what people do in their podiatry education as well. It's, like, continuous learning. Right?

Like Yeah. We don't like, the world, like, the world we live in has changes all the time, so we have to be ready to be disrupted over what the next big thing is. And not that you have to like you said, you don't have to jump in and become like a a crazy TikTok dancer like I'm sure you are behind the scenes. That also look I'll have to look up Tyson Franklin on TikTok when I'm we're done with this podcast. But but but you just have to, like like you said, just see what's out there and then focus on a few things, Have a good cadence of quality content.

If it's not hitting, then, you know, make some adjustments. But no, I thought that, you know, this it totally makes total sense that the online marketing is that biggest pillar, and the one that you're working on on a consistent basis. So so thanks for sharing those tips today, and I'll talk to you soon, Tyson.

I look forward to it. I look forward to the next episode. Talk you later, Jim.

See Tyson.

Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim Mcdonald. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.